Attempts at adapting Herman Melville's masterpiece Moby Dick to the screen and the stage have generally met with about as much success as Ahab had with the great white whale. Great artists have tried to harpoon this story and make it their own, but no one has quite conquered it. Film director John Huston came pretty close when, in 1956, he turned Gregory Peck into Captain Ahab and made an ambitious if dull epic. Huston hired Orson Welles to play the fire and brimstone preacher who makes a brief appearance early on in the story; film critic Andrew Sarris once suggested that Huston should have played the preacher and Welles should have directed the movie. No doubt he said this because Welles[...]